“Encore” Means “Sing It Again”

When audiences night after night called upon Rutland Barrington to repeat one of the Sargeant’s songs in The Pirates of Penzance, Barrington approached Gilbert to ask if the librettist would write him some new words to present as an encore. Gilbert dismissed the request with the retort, “Encore means ‘sing it again’” (Barrington 39). This anecdote illustrates not just Gilbert’s occasional irascibility and reluctance to permit actors to tinker with scripts, but also a principle by which he and his collaborators worked. Having found popular themes for their first three operas, Gilbert and Sullivan sang them again with variations in subsequent productions. As the previous chapter demonstrated, among these themes was validation of a middle-class world-view, and in this chapter I will trace variations as they occur in later operas, those produced after the collaborators’ reputation was secured. Operas from The Pirates of Penzance (1879) through The Grand Duke (1896) varied considerably in their settings and subjects, yet all appealed to theatergoers by demonstrating that (as Pish-Tush sings in The Mikado) “All is right as right can be” in a community where rank is respected and bourgeois standards of behavior are met.